Outside speech, the association that is made in the memory between words having something in common creates different groups, series, families, within which very diverse relations obtain but belonging to a single category: these are associative relations.

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I’m almost never serious, and I’m always too serious. Too deep, too shallow. Too sensitive, too cold hearted. I’m like a collection of paradoxes.

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Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula.

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Psychologically our thought-apart from its expression in words-is only a shapeless and indistinct mass.

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A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas.

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The connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary.

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It is useful to the historian, among others, to be able to see the commonest forms of different phenomena, whether phonetic, morphological or other, and how language lives, carries on and changes over time.

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Language furnishes the best proof that a law accepted by a community is a thing that is tolerated and not a rule to which all freely consent.

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Nearly all institutions, it might be said, are based on signs, but these signs do not directly evoke things.

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Linguistics will have to recognise laws operating universally in language, and in a strictly rational manner, separating general phenomena from those restricted to one branch of languages or another.

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